


We were young once

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Acceptance, Healing, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post Season 6, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 14:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15098348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: Shiro gets some time to recover. Keith helps him fit all the pieces back together.





	We were young once

**Author's Note:**

> I still have a lot of Season 6 feelings, and all the recent interviews just make me ache for Shiro more. There's definitely a lot he needs to work through after everything he has been through, but also, I hope he finds his place in it all again. 
> 
> And as usual, you can come find me over [on twitter!](https://twitter.com/ByMidnightFlame)

“Is there a place for the broken?”

*

The sky here burns like midnight oil. A thick, murky black with a moonlit sheen, and all across its expanse, specks of stars shimmer with a light he knows is fading by the second, its source maybe already having run itself to the very end of it all it could be. Bang! That’s how someone once said it all ended. As if endings could be that carefully crafted, built up until they have nothing left to do but explode across the universe. He hadn’t foreseen his end, though he had felt it like a snake through the grass, working its way to his soul. Just going and going. One of those days, Shiro knew it was going to sink its fangs into him, and it would all be over. He had been counting the days since his capture no differently than a god counted a hero’s borrowed time. At some point, when the task was complete and the awaited for crisis averted, he would be called to pay for the excesses granted to him.

The crisis had indeed come, only it hadn’t been completely averted. But the last of the sand had run out on his hourglass, and in the flash of a moment, he had become nothing. And everything. That’s what it had felt like there inside of the Black Lion. It was screaming into the void and hearing only the echo of you. It was counting stars and watching char-black planets halo themselves with purple light, the self-christened royalty of this space that was nowhere and everywhere all at once. Being on the astral plane was realizing someone else had stopped his time. Another intervening god who had simply said _not yet, my son_.

Out here though, he can feel the wind rolling over his skin, and there is breath filling his lungs, and they ache when he holds it too long. Because there’s something in the pain of a body wanting to live that reminds him that he is indeed alive. So, his lungs ache, and he holds his breath, and just when he thinks they might combust, he exhales, and life comes rushing through him all over again.

*

“If there’s one thing you taught me, it’s that all broken things need a place to heal, Shiro. . .”

*

He’s nothing but an ember, glowing pale red amidst the ash of a former life. Since returning to corporeal form, Shiro has been like a puzzle with a portion of its pieces now scattered across the floor. Keith has been watching him as he’s moved to pick up the various bits of himself, how one memory gives him pause or another is carefully tucked away until he’s ready to make it part of his whole. Those are the moments Shiro grows quiet, sitting there, staring up at the sky that had once called to him like some galactic siren glittering with stardust and dreams. It took him time to understand it, but Keith has now realized that people can drown in ways that rob them of far greater things than their breath.

Shiro isn’t drowning anymore, but he’s still adrift in many ways. Not all of them bad. Just as the two years with his mother had given him a chance to revisit and close old wounds, Keith sees these present moments offering Shiro much of the same. But, perhaps it’s that insight that has given him that understanding: the broken do not have to stay broken, but they do need time. And time is the one thing none of them had been able to give Shiro. It has, however, handed Keith this quiet, slightly pained sliver of knowledge about it all. How Shiro took upon himself all the things they couldn’t shoulder when their fight for the universe began. No different than fledgling birds still clinging to the comfort of a nest, Shiro had provided them with a safety net. Because of him, they had become the Paladins they were today. 

Without him, Keith would have been a far different man. 

It’s why he no longer hesitates. When the silence calls Shiro inward, he takes a seat beside him and laces their fingers together. He talks about the desert then, all the things he knows Shiro knows but somehow confirms the present moment between them. He tells him about the memories of his own youth, recovered in a time field that had blown them up like landmines and somehow in their scattering came to fill the holes inside of him. He recounts various moments over those two years, as though in spilling out his timeline he can somehow make the time Shiro spent wandering the astral plane feel a little less like loss. 

He no longer takes a second thought when Shiro is moving about the kitchen, trying to work his mind around a two-handed task, and simply wraps his arms around Shiro’s waist. Pressed against Shiro’s back, Keith always says he’ll take that cup of tea, and watches with affection-laced delight as the tension unfurls from around Shiro’s forearm and the task shows itself as simple as they both know it to be. 

And it’s why, when the moon scours the sky, he lets Sleep linger along the periphery of their bed, as eager as a cosmic wolf to jump into place between them. Shiro comes to life when they’re together, though it had started slowly enough. Tentative, uncertain, he had been a man trying to navigate a sea with a foreign sky unraveling above him. But with each night, Keith dropped kisses like fallen stars and lit them up to the beat of his heart. With each one planted, a hope he entrusted would one day blossom inside of Shiro. And with every passing night, he swears that is the case. Because day-by-day, night-by-night, Shiro finds more pieces of himself and the picture of him grows a little more complete.

*

“Is this where I get fixed then?”

*

It took some getting used to. The white hair, the missing arm, the body that wasn’t his body and yet was entirely his. It was like coming back home only to realize someone else had been there - the walls were painted a different shade, the furniture while the same had been rearranged, the wood floors now stained a slightly darker brown though they still creaked in all the same spots. The shock of it faded quickly, that first initial gut-punch of it at least. What lasted longer were the questions that rippled out in its wake - just who is he?

Shiro knows who he had been. And he remembers the dreams he had carried for all he had wanted to be. What sits, glaring empty at him, is the present moment, and that has turned his future into this indistinct haze. Like he had been sitting in the sun so long he couldn’t even trust his own perceptions anymore. He chalks it up to an after-effect of being inside of the Black Lion for all those months. 

But just when he thinks he’s starting to lose himself to the blackout distance of the unknown (miles and miles to go, someone had once said, but better done through the path untraveled), fingers glide across his skin, and a smile spills, unseen but he knows just how beautiful it is, against his cheek. Shiro jokes that Keith’s intuition only grew stronger with those two years spent traveling across time itself. Keith never hesitates when he says it’s because he knows Shiro.

And he can’t deny that. 

Keith knows him better than he knows himself some days. Those are the days they take tea out on the porch and talk about the stories woven into constellations, about the memories that lit up the sky and filled in a lifetime of blank spaces. It’s where he laughs about the fix-ups with that same dark gloss coating the sound that always makes Keith’s brow furrow and his lips pull tight (he hadn’t grown out of that habit, though Shiro wonders if it’s just what his bleak sense of humor deserves). It’s the place Keith tells him that he loves him, again and again, until he comes to believe it himself. 

_He_ hadn’t forgotten that, so neither had Shiro.

*

“No. . .I think this is where we get to find ourselves.”


End file.
